Forum Helps Immigrants Know Their Rights

 

In light of recent changes to federal immigration policy, lots of immigrants are living in fear. That’s why El Centro Hispano – a Triangle-area Latino advocacy group – decided to organize a series of events dedicated to answering questions and addressing concerns from the immigrant community.

For Jenny Doyle, a speaker at the event and an immigration lawyer for the last five years, she said her job has changed since President Trump took office.

“Unfortunately we’re having to look a little more closely so that we adequately represent any of our clients who may find themselves in removal and potentially detentioned,” she said.

The president’s emphasis on deporting undocumented immigrants is just one of the reasons that immigrants – both documented and undocumented – are nervous.

“We’ve already seen some unfortunate situations,” she said. “And we’re getting a lot more phone calls, there’s no question about it.”

Doyle was one of ten people invited to speak at the event, called “Know Your Rights,” in Hillsborough.  It was a town-hall-style forum that allowed concerned community members to clarify what exactly they could – and should – do in certain situations.

One woman talked, in Spanish, about an experience she had at a local Food Lion, where a fellow shopper pointedly asked her where she was from. Doyle answered her at the time in Spanish, but clarified what she said afterward.

“If a person, like the one that mentioned Food Lion, if some private citizen approaches them and wants to ask what their status is, there’s no reason that they need to respond to that,” she said. “They can ignore them or walk away.”

Hillsborough police chief Duane Hampton was another speaker on the panel. He said that he is frustrated with the fact that residents of Hillsborough are living in fear.

“These folks are running scared of so many rumors…a lot of bad information,” he said. “I personally am just tired of it. These folks ought to be able to live their lives.”

Hampton, who has been Hillsborough’s police chief since November 2010, has regular meetings with Latino community members. He said he wants them to know that local law enforcement is there to protect them.

“We try to stay out of the political world,” he said. “We’re here to serve the people. We’re doing the best we can to work with the laws that we have to try to keep everybody safe.”

Hillsborough mayor Tom Stevens echoed this sentiment.

“In many respects, I think the fear is that we’re all agents of the government and if you have any point of contact, that’s a place where I could be in danger of deportation or being detained,” he said. “We are not going out trying to catch people for not being documented. And as the police chief said, it’s really different, we’re a different jurisdiction.”

He added, laughing, “It’s about traffic.”

If immigrants do find themselves in a situation where they feel threatened, Doyle says that preventing the situation from escalating is the most effective next step.

“Locate an attorney that you can trust,” she said. “And similarly, we all have a right to remain silent and we do not need to answer questions and we have the right to speak to an attorney to see what we need to answer.”

If you do not have an attorney already that you trust, Doyle recommends looking at AILA.org, which is an online database of immigration lawyers in your area.